How Can This Possibly Happen?

The way things are going, the rest of the world may build a big, beautiful wall around this country in order to keep the prion disease from escaping. One of its more prominent symptoms is the renegade operations of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement folks, who have run amok with the full encouragement of the last two administrations, and with as little care for the Constitution as a tornado does for a strip mall.

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And now, thanks to the LA Times, we find that even citizens of the United States are not safe.

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents repeatedly target U.S. citizens for deportation by mistake, making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations, according to a Times review of federal lawsuits, internal ICE documents and interviews.

Since 2012, ICE has released from its custody more than 1,480 people after investigating their citizenship claims, according to agency figures. And a Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases in the country’s immigration courts in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.

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Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.

You might wish you could blame these episodes on the current president*, but ICE has had the shackles off for a while now. However, under this administration*, even the minimal restrictions on the agency have been removed.

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In 2015, ICE officials again instructed agents to conduct deeper investigations into a person’s possible citizenship, requiring them to check if a person met any of a number of indicators of citizenship, such as whether they had served in the military or were adopted by a U.S. citizen. Last April, ICE abandoned a policy that allowed agents to ask local police to detain people born abroad if there was no evidence in the databases showing they were citizens.

That standard, however, persists in immigration court, where those born outside the country must prove why they belong in the U.S. A former senior attorney for ICE’s regional office in Los Angeles said the 2009 directive to conduct legal reviews of all citizenship claims brought dozens of cases to her desk every week. The people were all in custody, and agents, she said, generally assumed they were lying.

The Rhode Island case is particularly awful. A woman named Ana Morales, an immigrant from Guatemala who’d been a naturalized citizen for more than 20 years, was picked up twice and, when a state judge ordered her release, the ICE office blew him off.

The mother of five, who cleaned houses and offices for a living, was strip-searched and her anxiety medications were confiscated. The following day, an ICE agent drove Morales to the federal agency’s offices for questioning. Met there by her husband with her passport, the agent realized the error and freed Morales. Nearly nine years later, Morales, 54, still sobs recalling her night in prison, where she said she suffered panic attacks and guards accused her of lying about her citizenship.

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Luckily, though, other federal agencies are well-financed, well-staffed, and more than able to handle their duties as regards immigration. From The New York Times:

The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency’s Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody. The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.

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From last October to the end of the year, officials at the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement tried to reach 7,635 children and their sponsors, Mr. Wagner testified. From these calls, officials learned that 6,075 children remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight had run away, five had been removed from the United States and 52 had relocated to live with a nonsponsor. But officials at the agency were unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 children, Mr. Wagner said.

How can this possibly happen? Aren’t there, you know, safeguards to prevent children fleeing war zones from being put to work in the fields or, worse, at some gentleman’s club in that neighborhood we like to call, “Out By The Airport”?

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To prevent similar episodes, the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments signed a memorandum of understanding in 2016, and agreed to establish joint procedures within one year for dealing with unaccompanied migrant children. More than a year after the new guidelines were due, the two agencies have not completed them, Mr. Portman said.

And they won’t, either. New priorities, you understand. Elections have consequences.

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